E. E. Cummings Quotes

163 Sourced Quotes

At least the Pilgrim Fathers used to shoot Indians: the Pilgrim Children merely punch time clocks.

E. E. Cummings
Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.

E. E. Cummings
Humanity i love you because
when you're hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink

E. E. Cummings
America makes prodigious mistakes, America has colossal faults, but one thing cannot be denied: America is always on the move. She may be going to Hell, of course, but at least she isn't standing still.

E. E. Cummings
When you confuse art with propaganda, you confuse an act of God with something which can be turned on and off like the hot water faucet. If "God" means nothing to you (or less than nothing) I'll cheerfully substitute one of your own favorite words,"freedom". You confuse freedom—the only freedom—with absolute tyranny…
all over this so-called world, hundreds of millions of servile and insolent inhuman unbeings are busily unrolling in the enlightenment of propaganda.

E. E. Cummings
Plato Told
Him: he couldn't
believe it (jesus told him; he
wouldn't believe
it) lao tsze
certainly told
him, and general
(yes mam)
sherman;
and even
(believe it
Or Not)you
Told Him: i told
him; we told him
(he didn't believe it, no sir)

E. E. Cummings
Art is a mystery.
A mystery is something immeasurable.
In so far as every child and woman and man may be immeasurable, art is the mystery of every man and woman and child. In so far as a human being is an artist, skies and mountains and oceans and thunderbolts and butterflies are immeasurable; and art is every mystery of nature. Nothing measurable can be alive; nothing which is not alive can be art; nothing which cannot be art is true: and everything untrue doesn't matter a very good God damn...

E. E. Cummings
The cunning the craven
… they live for until
though the sun in his heaven
says Now

E. E. Cummings
Time is a tree (this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough

E. E. Cummings
Nothing false and possible is love
(who's imagined, therefore limitless)
love's to giving as to keeping's give; as yes is to if, love is to yes

E. E. Cummings
Take me up into your mind once or twice before I die (you know why: just because the eyes of you and me will be full of dirt some day). Quickly take me up into the bright child of your mind.

E. E. Cummings
Love is a deeper season
than reason;
my sweet one
(and april's where we're).

E. E. Cummings
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.

E. E. Cummings
Tumbling-hair picker of buttercups violets dandelions And the big bullying daisies through the field wonderful with eyes a little sorry Another comes also picking flowers

E. E. Cummings
—when skies are hanged and oceans drowned, the single secret will still be man

E. E. Cummings
Poetry and every other art was and is and forever will be strictly and distinctly a question of individuality.... poetry is being, not doing.... if poetry is your goal, you've got to forget all about punishments and all about rewards and all about selfstyled obligations and duties and responsibilities...

E. E. Cummings
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

E. E. Cummings
Though mankind persuades
itself that every weed's
a rose, roses (you feel
certain) will only smile

E. E. Cummings
Tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do),
we'll move away still further: into now

E. E. Cummings
Each ignorant gladness —unteaches what despair preaches

E. E. Cummings
Milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were; and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone for whatever we lose (like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

E. E. Cummings
I feel that (false and true are merely to know)
Love only has ever been, is, and will ever be

E. E. Cummings
Concerning this selfstyled world's greatest and most generous literary figure: who had just arrived in our nation's capitol, attired in half a GI uniform and ready to be hanged as a traitor by the only country which ever made even a pretense of fighting for freedom of speech
Re Ezra Pound — poetry happens to be an art; and artists happen to be human beings.

E. E. Cummings
Somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence.

E. E. Cummings
I shall imagine life is not worth dying, if (and when) roses complain their beauties are in vain but though mankind persuades itself that every weed's a rose, roses (you feel certain) will only smile

E. E. Cummings
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

E. E. Cummings
Love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun, more last than star...

E. E. Cummings
Dreamtree, truthtree tree of jubilee: with aeons of (trivial merely)existence, all when may not measure a now of your treasure

E. E. Cummings
They work and they pray
and they bow to a must
though the earth in her splendor
says May

E. E. Cummings
A salesman is an it that stinks to please but whether to please itself or someone else makes no more difference than if it sells hate condoms education snakeoil vac uumcleaners terror strawberries democ ra(caveat emptor)cy superfluous hair

E. E. Cummings